Moonfrog grabs $15M to build games people play in metro trains and auto-rickshaws

Bangalore-based mobile game developer Moonfrog Labs has just bagged US$15 million in series A funding from Tiger Global and the earlier investor Sequoia Capital, who had put US$1 million in the seed round.

Moonfrog was founded in 2013 by five game developers – Tanay Tayal, Ankit Jain, Kumar Puspesh, Oliver Jones, and Dimpalkumar Maisuriya. It is best known for Teen Patti Gold, an Indian three-card version of poker, which has been downloaded over two million times and is one of the top five grossing apps on both Android and iOS platforms. It also has a multi-player bingo game which is popular. The games have been designed with India’s low bandwidth “flaky internet” connections in mind.

Tanay Tayal explains to Tech in Asia how this is done:

Our quality assurance team actually tests new features while travelling in auto-rickshaws or in a metro train. We have focused on keeping the data footprint very low. Playing an hour of Teen Patti Gold while being connected to the internet uses the same amount of data that one would use for say browsing five minutes on Facebook.

Teen Patti Gold is also available in three Indian languages, apart from English. This is just one of the ways in which Moonfrog is localizing content for gamers in India who “discover, learn, and play games in an altogether different way compared to any other country. In our experience, we have found that Indian players want content that is not only available in the language they prefer, but also localized in terms of look and feel and art styles,” says Tayal, who earlier worked at Zynga, the creator of Farmville.

The current funding round will also help Moonfrog to develop games in new genres, including action, strategy, and roleplaying, adds Tayal.

“The team at Moonfrog has exceptional global experience and an excellent track record of execution,” says Lee Fixel, partner at Tiger Global.

Moonfrog’s first investor Sequoia had also invested in Octro, a Delhi-based mobile gaming company, which raised US$15 million last June. Octro also has a Teen Patti poker game, to which it has added a cricket betting feature to catch the current World Cup fever.